


Delicate

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Awkwardness, Babyfic, F/M, Genderswap, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Relationship Romance, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:46:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nine months after a mysterious encounter upsets their friendship and a budding romance, Chekov and Sulu begin to work things out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Delicate

**Author's Note:**

> Another for [this meme](http://echoinautumn.livejournal.com/65992.html), this time for Hikari Sulu and babyfic. I’ve reread this a few times, trying to figure out how to improve it, because it feels unpolished to me, but I can’t pinpoint the things that I want to make better about it. Plenty of meta about their futures and careers and whatnot ahoy, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not working with this as much as I’d like to have done in the interest of moving on to other projects.

*

Every part of Sulu’s body hurts when she wakes up. Blinking at the ceiling of the medical bay, she thinks of her earliest fencing practices, the ones when her blows landed too hard and it was only fair that she took equally brutal retaliation from her sparring partners. Even the aching that digs past her muscle tissue and into her bones is familiar in that way, but Sulu knows it’s been years since she’s had a suitable partner, let alone one who has been able to make her hurt like this. There’s emptiness in the aching, though she knows before she touches her soft belly that it’s natural to feel this way; she was there for every moment of her labor, and she remembers faintly the crackling cries and the weight of a perfectly healthy baby boy.

Beside the bed, someone shifts, and Sulu tenses when the baby fusses quietly, cracking her eyes and looking over to see Chekov carefully soothing her baby, rocking slowly, inexpertly but earnestly. Sulu’s heart races, and she nearly closes her eyes again, but Chekov looks up as her hands move and smiles warmly, if sheepishly. Sulu remembers that kind of smile, though he hasn’t given it to her in months. Sulu doesn’t think it’s really his fault; she’s the one who has been avoiding him. They haven’t talked about this, about the away mission neither of them remembers particularly vibrantly, or the awkward return to the ship. They no longer spoke unless they were on duty. The charged dates they had been going on for months beforehand, or the closest approximation to dates they could get on a starship, halted immediately, and even though six years with Chekov has made him Sulu’s closest friend, they’ve been drifting for nine months, waiting.

“Lieutenant,” she croaks, and a brief flash of hurt flashes over Chekov’s face at the formality.

“Doctor McCoy called me away from the bridge,” he explains hastily, though Sulu remembers that he was there when she was in labor, hovering nervously on the edge of the room until McCoy snapped at him to get out or lend a hand. Sulu isn’t upset that he chose to leave, to jitter around somewhere else. She’s a starship pilot, she doesn’t need anyone to hold her hand, but neither can she pretend that it wouldn’t have been nice. Nine months is a long time to do this alone, though Kirk and McCoy and the rest of the crew have all been supportive, if cautious, waiting for her to make up her mind. Before Chapel pressed the baby into her arms, pink and squawking and undeniably human, Sulu had wondered if it was possible that she was having an alien baby, and she’d never allowed McCoy to tell her anything beyond her own health or considered a name, too worried that she wouldn’t be allowed to keep it, that something would go horribly wrong; that she would be too attached.

Nine months, she thinks, is also a long time to go without her best friend. Sulu is relieved to see him here, like a tight, tense knot in her gut has loosened.

“He said you were sleeping.” Chekov swallows and begins to stand up, reluctantly moving to give the baby back to her. “He also said that he finished his tests.”

“He’s yours, isn’t he?” she asks simply, the culmination of all the tension between them, and she’s not surprised at all about how this feels. They’ve always had an easy dynamic, since the first day on the bridge to the horrifying moment when Sulu remembered his hands on her and thought they had broken something fragile.

Chekov smiles again, and she understands: what they have, whatever it is, isn’t so delicate that it could have been broken by this. Sulu opens her mouth to apologize, but he shakes his head, pulls his chair closer to the biobed with his foot, and sits down with her son— _their_ son—cradled against his chest.

“Yes,” he answers simply, and Sulu sees the impatient flash, the urge to ask questions, the same as the first time he asked if he could kiss her after dinner on Starbase 24.

Sulu wants to tell him to be patient, to give them both time to get used to this before they try to work out the details of what’s happened, what it means for their friendship, the premature sparks of warmth that haven’t left her entirely. Instead, she sighs, “Chekov,” just like before.

When she reaches out, she doesn’t immediately take her son from him, and she doesn’t pull him closer, but she does touch his arm, and meet his eyes, and begin to smile.


End file.
